Rand Paul and Realism

Will Inboden was not impressed with Rand Paul’s foreign policy speech:

At the outset of his remarks Senator Paul oddly claims the mantle of being a “realist.” This seems to have triggered some affection from other professing realists, which is curious since one looks in vain through Paul’s speech for much realist content.

Since I’m apparently one of the “professing realists” in question, I suppose I ought to identify which parts of the speech I thought made sense. I have already commentedon the speecha fewtimes and focused on the parts I didn’t accept, so I’ll try to sum up briefly what I did like about it.

Paul’s argument that containment should be an option isn’t the position that I prefer in the Iran debate, but it represents enough of a departure from the “prevention” consensus view that it merits some praise. Since containment was used against Hagel as a bludgeon at his hearing just a few days before the speech, Sen. Paul’s decision to praise the concept and its original author seemed to me to be a meaningful signal that he didn’t share the bipartisan desire to dismiss it out of hand. He contrasted Kennan’s original view of containment with the more aggressive and global Truman Doctrine, whose supporters he correctly likened to contemporary hard-liners that have scarcely ever seen a foreign conflict that they didn’t think imperiled U.S. interests in some way. Given the modern Republican hawkish tendency to celebrate Truman as one of their heroes, his derision of contemporary hard-liners as the “Truman caucus” was remarkable and most welcome.

Paul was trying to reach a Republican and conservative audience that wasn’t closely aligned with non-interventionists or neoconservatives. That is how I understood his quixotic attempt to reconcile Kennan and Reagan. Of course it’s true, as Leon Hadar says, that Kennan and Reagan were not in agreement on many things at the time, and Kennan didn’t think much of Reagan or later claims lauding the supposed effects of his administration’s policies. Sen. Paul was choosing to emphasize the better parts of Reagan’s record, focusing on the small number of Reagan’s military interventions and his later arms control negotiations. I am guessing he was trying to use Reagan to bridge the gap between the audience he was addressing and the arguments for restraint and prudence that he wanted them to hear. Finally, I have been calling on Republicans to adopt a foreign policy of restraint and prudence, and Sen. Paul’s speech represented a first attempt to do just that.

As for my being a “professing realist,” I have never claimed to be one, but I am frequently identified this way because I am often sympathetic to arguments made by self-identified realists. I recognize that hostility to those arguments has made U.S. foreign policy substantially worse over at least the last twenty years, and so I’m pleased when they enjoy a revival. The fact that I am often mistaken for a realist underscores the problem with how the term is used: it is applied very liberally to a wide range of people. This includes virtually anyone who thinks war should be a last resort, those who see some value in diplomatic engagement, and those who look askance at Wilsonian fantasies of democracy promotion and nation-building. One could meet all of those criteria (as Sen. Paul does) and not be a realist according to the peculiar definition provided by Inboden’s colleague Paul Bonicelli. Using an entirely different standard, one might conclude that Obama is a realist. Realist often means whatever the person deploying the term wants it to mean, and when it is used positively it often just means “not a warmongering ideologue.”

The label is not very useful as a descriptor any longer because it has become a catch-all term to refer to almost anyone opposed to a narrow range of hard-line and hawkish views. Thus Sen. Paul identifies as a realist because it is a designation with a Republican pedigree that does not commit him to identifying solely with his father’s views or the prevailing views in the GOP. Considering the alternatives that antiwar conservatives and libertarians have to work with, that is a significant improvement over what his colleagues are offering. That doesn’t make him the next Fulbright or the next Taft, but such a figure will always be as elusive as looking for the next Reagan.

It’s disappointing to read that the younger Paul has joined the forces attempting to filibuster the vote over Senator Hagel’s nomination on the specious, and of course super-ironic, grounds that the latter may have been the recipient of funds from unnamed foreign governments. Is the son cut from the same cloth as dear old dad?

Phil Giraldi has sized up Rand Paul accurately. The best that can be said is that he is being mendacious and duplicitous in order to achieve power. That makes him no different from the commonest of garden variety bait and switch politicians.

I think you sum up nicely the way in which the term “realist” has become so ubiquitous as to almost be meaningless. But I also think that the term has become, at least in some fields, even more nonsensical than you describe.

Working as I do in the field of US policy toward China, “realist” sometimes has the connotation you describe — i.e. the Bob Zoellick-type Republican that advocates China becoming a “responsible stakeholder,” as opposed to the neoconservative Republican type that advocates ramped-up arms sales to Taiwan, etc.

However, far more often in this field, “realist” is used pejoratively to refer to structural or offensive realists such as John Mearsheimer or the power transition theorists who see China’s rise as inevitably leading to conflict with the United States, and as a result, eschew most attempts to diplomatically engage China on everything from arms control to military-to-military exchange and instead advocate for a strategy of containment (another word that has a far more negative connotation in a China context than it does in an Iran context) that seeks to wage and win a “contest for supremacy” against China in the Western Pacific.

While there are more classical realist types like Charles Glaser at GW (see “Will China’s Rise Lead to War?” Foreign Affairs, Mar/Apr 2011) or Jonathan Kirshner at Cornell (see “The tragedy of offensive realism: Classical realism and the rise of China,” European Journal of International Relations 18:1, March 2012), who have written about why classical realism does not have to mean a zero-sum or inevitably conflictual bilateral US-China relationship, they do not define what most China analysts think of when they hear or use the term “realist.”

So in other words, in the China field at least, “realist” generally has almost the opposite connotation of the one you give above (“not a warmongering ideologue”). As a conservative who shares an affinity with many “realist” foreign policy types if you’re talking about the Hagel/Zoellick/Huntsman variety, but a China analyst who does not at all share an affinity with the structural realist types, I find this connotative incongruity very aggravating.

Thanks for that. That’s a great comment. It’s one of the ongoing problems that I have with arguments for offshore balancing. They’re based on the assumption that the U.S. has a necessary role to counter-balance Chinese influence in its own region, and that puts the two on a collision course. It’s the difference between, say, Huntsman and someone like Aaron Friedberg, who has been promiting the “contest for supremacy” idea for some time.

Thanks for your response. I share your reservations about offshore balancing, at least as it is often applied to China. But I actually tend to believe that the type of “offshore balancing” articulated by folks like Mearsheimer (as I understand it, Friedberg eschews that terminology) is actually just “selective engagement” light, with certain rhetorical accouterments of offshore balancing. In other words–to paraphrase Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride–he keeps using that word; I do not think it means what he thinks it means.

Yes, Mearsheimer does advocate that the United States build up a regional coalition to contain China, which is (sort of) a part of offshore balancing (though he tends to emphasize “containment” more than “balancing,” approaches that are not one and the same). In this sense, he bills his proposed strategy as one of offshore balancing because he is advocating using alliances to oppose Chinese regional hegemony (which, I might add, is not indisputably even a Chinese strategic objective, though I understand that structural realism posits that it will become such given states’ drive to maximize their security, and maybe so).

But beyond these overtures, he also calls for the United States to draw down its presence elsewhere in the world precisely so that it can “concentrate its forces against China” (to quote his “Imperial by Design” in The National Interest, Jan/Feb 2011). I don’t know about you, but that basically sounds to me like selective engagement, minus Europe and the Middle East.

In contrast, as I understand it, true offshore balancing is a type of strategy wherein the United States would cultivate alliances in Asia to balance against China, require allies to provide for more of their own security, and maintain access arrangements so that Washington could insert its forces if and when it deemed necessary, without necessarily maintaining an active or forward-deployed military presence in the region. That is not what Mearsheimer, Friedberg, and China hawks advocate; in fact, they generally quite vociferously oppose such a strategy.

I do like a lot of what Mearsheimer has to say about the flaws in America’s post-Cold War grand strategy of global dominance, and I don’t deny that China’s rise could turn into a right mess (in no small part because chances are good that America will overreact and mismanage the shifting balance of power). But I also think he has a real blind spot on Asia — primarily in that he ignores the actual concrete security interests that will incentivize China, the United States, and other Asian nations to avoid such a zero-sum future as the one he predicts.